Free to a Bad Home

You now have the chance to adopt your very own hellhound puppy!

Due to decreasing demand for eternal damnation over the last two millennia (yes, we’re looking at you, J.C.) we’ve been forced to downsize our staff. That means we no longer have the demonpower necessary to take care of our four-legged friends. And you have the opportunity of a lifetime.

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Long Now

Julie knocked, balancing a warm crock pot on one knee. Lance answered, holding a textbook in one hand. Julie smiled. That was his idea of light reading, but she planned to marry him anyway.

“Come on in.”

“Whoa!” Julie stopped mid-step, nearly dropping her pot. “I thought it was just me.”

Lance escorted her gently through the door so that he could close it.

“It’s just the two of us.”

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New Speculative Fiction Website

I have just finished moving my Speculative Fiction Blog to it’s new home at freesciencefiction.com. I will start phasing out the old site at tgenedavis.com, that address should start forwarding to the new one any time.

If you have links to stories on the old site, you’ll want to update those links for the new site.

The weekly reminder for new stories will have an updated look, and links to classic stories as well as the new story of the week.

I’m sure there will be a few kinks to work out. Feel free to give constructive feedback @TGeneDavis on Twitter. Also, please let me know if you find any typos or bugs on the new site, so I can fix them.

Best regards,

T. Gene Davis

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Annie’s Planets

Nico noticed the little girl as she pressed herself against the glass window of his antique store. She stared with intent but when he smiled, she didn’t smile back.

He returned to his work but looked up over the wire-rim of his glasses as the bell above the door tinkled. The little girl strode in, black braid swishing behind her, followed by a frazzled woman.

“Annie, wait,” the woman said, but the girl ignored her. Instead she stopped at the end of the counter to focus on the project in front of Nico.

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Layover

“The layover was only two years.”

Hazel let out a breath and crinkled her already wrinkled forehead. “He told me about it.”

Keira bounced her newborn child, more to calm herself than to calm the baby. “We’re newlyweds. How could he die? Was there a malfunction in stasis?”

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Closing Statement

Ladies and gentleman of the jury, I don’t expect you to understand. The mountain of evidence that seems to support the prosecution’s case is daunting to say the least, but all of it is based on an adolescent understanding of the forces that move the universe. I must stress to you once again that Ambassador Gupta is alive and well.

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Jack Twice-Caught and the Pusherman

No one in Bridge could remember exactly when the legend of the Pusherman began. As folk began to go missing, the stories just appeared, fully formed, as if they had fallen from the sky. Some in Bridge whispered that the Pusherman was an old graybeard who hunted children playing along the Edge because he was envious of their youth. Others said he was a jealous husband who pushed his cheating wife over the Edge and came to enjoy the taste of murder.

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Heart Patent

“Owen! You’ve got snail mail!”

“What’s that?” Owen asked, taking the envelope from his father.

“Don’t they teach you kids anything at college?”

Owen opened the envelope, and read the single sheet of paper. His father whistled from over his shoulder. “That looks official. Is it a scam?”

You are hereby ordered by the court to appear in civil hearing of copyright infringement, patent infringement, smuggling, and bootlegging of a human organ.

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Jackson’s Cat Videos

Jackson looked up from a cat video at the sound of flopping sandals on the floor he’d just cleaned. His expressionless middle-aged face bore the slightest frown. Was she management? She looked more like a tongue depressor escaped from a gardening expo than a supervisor. However, he didn’t know all the ship’s managers, so he placed his device in his pocket discretely. He picked up his mop from the floor and examined her progress. She left a trail of echoing “THOP” sounds across the hall’s tiled expanse.

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Self Service

Before pregnancy became extinct and babies stopped being born, the greasing of death’s once firm grip caused a lot of worry about the potential of the revived. Would they turn vicious? Could they be restored to a responsive state? How much humanity do we ascribe to an animated cadaver?

I stayed apart from it all. I had my farm, my family. Cora was marrying age, but once it became clear there wouldn’t be any grandchildren forthcoming, Ma stopped needling her. When the corpses wandered through, stinking, twitching, chattering, Bub and I ushered them off our land, gently, respectfully. Then we went back to work. Outside, the world clashed and gnashed its collective teeth. I had less use for it than ever.

Cora got sick first. I drove her into the city, threading my way past thickening crowds of the dead. She wheezed from the passenger seat of my pickup; pressed her fingers against the side window as if she were reaching for those grim mannequins.

“When did there get to be so many of them?”

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